Welcome to SWOT by Sound Story, your inside track on the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats looming for the creative industries.
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⚡ Trending: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reveals Hottest 100 votes. Words by Mary Varvaris. Source: TheMusic.com.au.
🎵 Music: Global audio streaming volume reached new heights in 2024, with total streams worldwide nearing the 5 trillion mark, market monitor Luminate has revealed in its year-end report for 2024. Words by Daniel Tencer. Source: Music Business Worldwide.
📰 Media: Emma Chow on why 2Day FM’s new breakfast team will succeed. Words by Natasha Lee. Source: Mediaweek.
💰 Advertising: In 2025, SCA will have new audio tools for driving planning and effectiveness, including Audology, a web-based regional and metro audience tool. Source: AdNews.
📲 Tech: How will social media companies ban teens? A leak revealed how big tech uses AI to guess age and gender. Words by Cam Wilson. Source: Crikey.
📜 Government: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese conducted rapid-fire meetings with top executives from the big television networks and sporting codes less than a fortnight before backtracking on his pledge to tackle advertising for online bookmakers. Words by Ronald Mizen. Source: The AFR.
🌶️ Spicy: ABC Radio Sydney posted a listener research question on its Facebook page yesterday. It may have been a little too soon. Source: Radio Today.
Strength: Trade Media Battles Heat Up
The media industry’s trade titles are in a very different position to this time last year, which should mean more spicy stories, deeper insights and a stronger events offering.
👉 News broke this week that former Mumbrella Co-Founder, Tim Burrowes, would be back at the helm from next week.
👉 Burrowes, backed by trade publishing house Intermedia Group, has also rolled his industry newsletter Unmade into the deal, creating a new company called Mumbrella Media.
👉 For now, both brands, as well as their editorial newsletters and events, will continue as normal, however Burrowes has oft been quoted paraphrasing industry thinker Adam Ferrier that “The best number of brands is one” – so it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.
👉 Mumbrella competitor Mediaweek is also under new ownership as of late last year, after being acquired by ASX-listed Vinyl Group, which also recently nabbed Concrete Playground.
👉 Plus, with B&T’s Cairns Crocodiles around the corner, Burrowes promising a big celebration for next year’s Mumbrella360, and some looming existential questions for the industry, we can expect all the publishers to ramp up their event curation in the coming months.
Weakness: When TV Talent Goes Too Far
It would have been a tough week to be in Channel 9’s PR department this week.
👉 One of the world’s most successful sports stars, Novak Djokovic refused an on-court interview following his win earlier this week. He attributed the ‘boycott’ to a ridiculous (and unfunny) skit conducted by the network’s broadcaster, Tony Jones.
👉 “Couple days ago the famous sports journalist who works for official broadcaster Channel Nine here in Australia, made a mockery of Serbian fans and also made insulting and offensive comments towards me. And since then, he chose not to issue any public apology. Neither did Channel Nine. So since they’re official broadcasters, I chose not to give interviews for Channel Nine,” he later clarified.
👉 Jones has since offered an apology, including the line, “I do apologise if he felt that I disrespected him,” which feels pretty soft given he called the tennis star “over-rated” and a “has-been”, and joked about kicking him out of the country.
👉 Another Nine sports presenter, Alex Cullen, has also been in hot water after allegedly accepting $50,000 from prominent property investor Adrian Portelli, for being the first to refer to him by his preferred moniker on television – “McLaren Guy”. The fallout saw Cullen exit Nine on Friday.
👉 Portelli has allegedly now donated the original $50,000 ‘gift’ to charity, however questions remain over the ethics of accepting the cash in the first place, and how, if at all, it was declared.
Opportunity: A Fresh Start For triple j?
Australia’s national youth music brand triple j turned 50 this week.
👉 Whilst it’s admittedly hard for a 50-year old brand to seem fresh, new and young, it was a great opportunity to look back on some of its achievements (and also some of its more… unusual moments).
👉 Musicians, presenters and politicians all joined in on the celebrations, and ABC Listen released the first hour from the station’s broadcast from January 1975 for fans to listen to.
👉 Not all coverage was celebratory, however, with The Sydney Morning Herald saying the idea of a “youth radio station has become something of an oxymoron”, its ratings are in “freefall”, and the station has an “existential problem”.
👉 Perhaps the big birthday bash will act as a reset for triple j, and offer the opportunity for a revitalisation of sorts?
👉 Afterall, we are facing a situation in which not a single Australian song topped the charts in 2024, so something has to give.
Threat: TikTok Tomfoolery
The wild changes to social media platforms’ policies, politics and powerbrokers of late seem like a threat to many institutions and ideas, but for today, we’ll just look at TikTok.
👉 TikTok briefly went dark in the US this week, and then came back.
👉 The ABC has posited that President Trump’s TikTok reprieve is temporary, and said change is coming, one way or another.
👉 And The Conversation has offered this take on what the ramifications may be for TikTok locally, noting that “social media companies and governments are now locked in a global power struggle”.
👉 As ever, multiple publications have pulled together lists of lessons about the debacle, including B&T and The SMH.
👉 As The SMH points out, there’s a lot at stake for Aussie creators, and the next 90 days will be crucial for them to find the best path forward.
The Fun Stuff
Quote of the Week: “We don’t do it. It’s lazy, it’s unoriginal, it’s boring. If we really needed to mismatch a couple to get drama on this show, it would be a very different show. We have to be matching for compatibility. This experiment is not a success if we don’t have anyone at the end. So we need success stories. We want success stories,” Endemol Shine Executive Producer Alexandra Spurway, making the (rather bold) claim that Married At First Sight is interested in real love, not fake drama.
📻Team Tidbit: Sound Story Consultant, Vivienne Kelly, kicks off her national radio show this week on ABC Radio National. You can listen to Medialand, co-hosted by Tim Burrowes, at 5:30pm on Friday, or catch up on the ABC Listen app.
